Larry’s Comments (group member since Nov 23, 2020)

Larry’s comments from the Nonfiction Reading - Only the Best group.

John, she truly is an amazing historian. I was first exposed to her through her history of early conflict between Native Americans and white colonists, The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity. And then her history of Wonder Woman! The Secret History of Wonder Woman. I have her general history of the United States, These Truths: A History of the United States, and need to find time to read it. But before that, I want to read her If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future. Few historians are able to write well both generally and in more than one specialty area. But like I said, she's amazing.

Sher wrote: "Carol-- I like the last line -- like a thunderbolt he falls. Having lived in eagle county in SE Alaska, I saw them every day, and I have seen some jagged descents, like a thunderbolt. :)"

Sher, eagles have returned to Northern Virginia in a big way. There is a small lake about two miles from us, where a friend said he saw both a bald eagle and two ospreys this weekend.

Carol wrote: "Here is The Eagle, by Alfred Tennyson.

He clasps the crag with crook'd hands,
close to the sun in lonely lands
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls.
And like a thunderbolt he falls."

A long, long time ago ... memorizing poems in elementary schools was a common thing. You had to memorize a poem and recite it in front of the class. This was a poem that I memorized and recited when I was in second grade in 1956/57 in Baltimore, Maryland. I chose it probably because it was short ... but it is a good poem. I do remember that I understood the poem.

I have read a good bit of Reynolds Price. His works establish a sense of place for North Carolina much as Anne Tyler does for Baltimore. He is a deeply human writer. I haven't read his first novels. I would be interested in what you think of that one.

John,

I love this information.

Larry

Just wonderful. Thoughtful and fun!

John wrote: "Larry wrote: "John wrote: "Larry wrote: "John wrote: "A few years back, I read a great piece by the book critic at the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley, who highly recommended John D. MacDonald. M..."

Yardley also has a very good biography of the tragic writer Frederick Exley. Yardley thought that Exley's first novel, A Fan's Notes was one of the great novels of the 20th century. Yeah ... maybe ... it certainly is good. It did receive the William Faulkner Award for best first novel, as well as the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. The conceit of the novel is that Exley (he's the protagonist himself) is a huge fan of Frank Gifford, I've read it three times and it holds up, but it still is problematic. I won't say more than that.

John wrote: "I only knew MacDonald from thr brightly colored paperbacks at airport booksellers — an ingenious marketing ploy that matched perfectly with MacDonald’s novels. .."

I always thought that was brilliant marketing also. I began buying him in the brightly colored versions first ... and then switched at some point to buying used copies of the paperbacks (some in the first paperback editions and some in the brightly colored cover versions) to finish reading them all. Another series to try, John, is Lawrence Block's Matthew Scudder series. This is the Wiki on that:

"Block's most famous creation, the ever-evolving Matthew Scudder, was introduced in 1976's The Sins of the Fathers as an alcoholic ex-cop working as an unlicensed private investigator in Hell's Kitchen. Originally published as paperbacks, the early novels are in many ways interchangeable; the second and third entries—In the Midst of Death (1976) and Time to Murder and Create (1977)—were written in the opposite order from their publication dates. 1982's 8 Million Ways to Die (filmed in 1986 by Hal Ashby, with unpopular results) breaks from that trend, concluding with Scudder introducing himself at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. The series was set to end on that note, but an idle promise Block had made to supply an editor friend with an original Scudder short resulted in "By the Dawn's Early Light", a story set during the character's drinking days, but told from the perspective of a recovering alcoholic. Block expanded on that with 1986's When the Sacred Ginmill Closes (named for a line in a song by folk singer Dave Van Ronk, a close friend), which proved not only one of the more literary entries, but also a favorite of the author and his fans. From then on, Scudder's circumstances rarely remain the same from one book to the next; 1990's A Ticket to the Boneyard, for example, reunites him with Elaine Mardell, a hooker from his days on the force, whom he marries several books later. Other fan favorites are 1991's taut, gruesome A Dance at the Slaughterhouse (winner of the Edgar Award for Best [mystery] Novel), and 1993's A Long Line of Dead Men, a tightly plotted puzzler featuring a rapidly dwindling fraternity known as the "Club of 31". A Walk Among the Tombstones, published in 1992, was made into a film, released in 2014, written and directed by Scott Frank, with Liam Neeson playing the lead role. The seventeenth entry, A Drop of the Hard Stuff was published in May 2011. "

The Matt Scudder series has that same evolution of a protagonist who is basically a good guy but a sexist into a much more enlightened man. Truly some crime noir but with a true hero at the same time ... and that makes it a but unique in the crime noir genre.

Carol wrote: "However, the daffodils are still there in the Lake District where he made his home and for that he would have been very grateful. .."

Carol,

I just got off a Zoom call a moment ago. The moderator started with asking the twelve of us our favorite flowers or plants. I said gardenias because of how they smelled. One man said that he didn't have a favorite but his least favorite was daffodils because he worked in the commercial daffodil fields as a young man. Work can change how we relate to certain pleasurable things, including flowers.

Larry

John wrote: "Larry wrote: "John wrote: "A few years back, I read a great piece by the book critic at the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley, who highly recommended John D. MacDonald. MacDonald was famous for pul..."

They get better and better all the way to the end. Which is not something that you can say about a lot of long series. Yardley was great in his recommendations and his so-called rediscoveries, captured in his Second Reading: Notable and Neglected Books Revisited

John wrote: "A few years back, I read a great piece by the book critic at the Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley, who highly recommended John D. MacDonald. MacDonald was famous for pulp fiction type work. But I was highly impressed when I read one of his books in the Travis McGee series. I must say, stellar prose and a great yarn. ..."

John, I've read every Travis McGee novel he wrote. I appreciate the evolution of McGee in these books from a honorable sexist to a much more enlightened man as the books go on and the times in which they were composed proceed. They are some of the best of the genre. His commentary of issues, both political and environmental, facing Florida as the 21 novels go on are wonderful.

POETRY FOR THE DAY (13 March 2021)

The World Is Too Much With Us
by William Wordsworth

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

Jeffrey wrote: "When I'm reading Cormac McCarthy I get stuck reading a sentence over and over because it's so good...."

I totally agree. He knows exactly what he's doing ... such power in his words. It's not the same, even though it's set in Texas, but Penelope Jiles in News of the World, sometimes has a similar effect. She brings her sensibility as a poet to her novels and to the writing in those novels.

Before I start Marilynne Robinson’s recently published fourth novel, Jack (the fourth in her four novel GILEAD series) I wanted to go back to the beginning and read the previous three. So I picked up Gilead (the first novel in the series) again. It’s the fictional autobiography of the Rev. John Ames ... written when he is 76 years old and slowly dying of congestive heart failure so that his seven year old son will have some memories of his life. And I just fell into this world again.

Robinson writes sentences that no one else would write. Ones like the following one.

“Trees sound different at night, and they smell different, too.

Now that’s not a singular accomplishment. Other writers can write sentences that no one else would write either … except they usually aren’t worth reading. But Robinson’s thinking, for me, as expressed in these sentences just stops me in my tracks. And I turn over her sentences in my mind, filing some of them away for future contemplation. They are just that good.

It really goes way beyond the words … to the thoughts captured by her words. Take this one … the thought of Rev. Ames.

“I read somewhere that a thing does not exist in relation to anything else cannot be said to exist.”

Today I picked up the current NEW SCIENTIST (March 13, 2021) and read the introduction to the cover story about quantum reality: “Why quantum is relative … Nothing truly exists—except in relation to other things, If we can get our heads around that one idea, we can begin to grasp the quantum realm, says Carlo Rovelli.”

Rovelli’s words dealing with a scientific concept of the deepest order immediately made me think back to those words in this religious novel of Marilynne Robinson. Deep stuff. Connected stuff.

Carol wrote: "I noticed another one from Issa:
Don't worry, spiders,
I keep house,
casually.

I don't know if there was meant to be humour, but it comes across as so."

It certainly brought a smile to my face.

POEM FOR THE DAY (8 March 2021)

The nightingale comes
with his shadow...
Spring window

Kobayashi, Issa. Issa's Best: A Translator's Selection of Master Haiku (p. 20). HaikuGuy.com. Kindle Edition.

When we over rely upon certain species, e.g., chestnuts, American bison, cod, etc. , and then that species is devastated either through overuse of the resource or as in the case of the chestnut, because of disease, then the human population gets hurt.

Trees ... so important and so threatened.

Here is a great article on American chestnut trees, how they almost disappeared and how they may be brought back. The answer includes GMOs and coal mines. I'll start with a paragraph from the article and then post a link to the article.

""By almost any metric, the American chestnut was a perfect tree. Massive, fast-growing, and rot-resistant, it was easy to mill into cabin logs, furniture, fence posts, and railroad ties. After being harvested, it resprouted; in 20 years, it was ready for the sawyer again. Wide limbs spanned the canopy, filtering sunlight and creating a diverse, layered forest below. Sweet, acorn-size nuts fed squirrels, deer, raccoons, and bears. Cooper's hawks nested in the high branches, wild turkeys in the lower forks. Insects thrived in the craggy bark, which was naturally tannic and a good choice for preserving hides. Cherokee people made dough from the crushed nuts, treated heart troubles with the leaves, and dressed wounds with astringent brewed from the sprouts. And in the fall, when the chestnuts piled up in carpets half a foot thick, white settler families collected and sold them by the bushel. One railroad station in West Virginia shipped 155,000 pounds of chestnuts to destinations along its northern route. ..."

SOURCE: https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/202...

Kate wrote: "Thank you, Larry! My podcast is called Readers Digress. You can see the past episodes we've done on our website here (https://www.rdrsdigress.com/), which include:

Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez
The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson
You'll Never Believe What Happened To Lacey: Crazy Stories About Racism by Amber Ruffin
SuperPumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac (up next)

We'd love to get suggestions for new/different topics or books people found especially rich for conversation! ..."

Kate, I'm really interested now. I just spent an hour today discussing Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation with 20 other people in our church on Zoom. We'll continue weekly for the next four weeks. And then in April, we will discuss the book with the author (Kristin Kobes Du Mez) herself. So I'll start with that particular podcast ... and then go on to the Jon Ronson episode. Many thanks.

Larry

Kate wrote: "Hi everyone! I've been on Goodreads for a while and occasionally frequent these groups for recommendations and to see what everyone is talking about.

This is my first time posting/replying to the group, so if this isn't allowed, please delete it (I want to be respectful of the group rules!).

I recently launched a podcast where my cohost and I discuss (exclusively) nonfiction books. Are there books that you think would make for an especially interesting conversation? So far, we've mainly done books we've read in the past and we're interested in a very wide variety of topics. We have a running list of possible books, but I'd love to hear your perspectives, as expert nonfiction readers. Thank you! ..."

Kate,

First of all, welcome to this group. We're glad to have you among us.

I'm happy to have others respond with suggestions of books to be discussed in your podcast. What is the name of that podcast?

Larry